T-Shirt Design Workshop 01: Foundation

1. Introduction: My name is Ray Dombroski. I'm a Graphic Designer, and a lot of what I do is designing T-shirts for surf apparel companies. One of the things I like most about what I do is traveling for inspiration. That can be going on photo shoots, but that can also mean going to flea markets and thrift shops in search of vintage finds. That can also mean going to hire and fashion boutiques, surf shops, museums, bookstores. A lot of people think designing a T-shirt is just about the graphic itself, but there's a lot of things involved that make a good T-shirt. There's all kinds of different fabrics, there's all kinds of specialty inks, there's all kinds of different printing methods, and how you combine all those elements with your graphic is what makes a good design. I'm teaching an online workshop all about T-shirt design. This is the first in a series of T-shirt design workshops. This class will teach you about the things you need to know to be a professional T-shirt designer. It doesn't matter if you want to design for men's or women's or if you're in the fashion or motorcycles or sports or music. This class will apply to anyone who's interested in learning more about T-shirt design. We'll talk about what makes a good T-shirt graphic. We'll also learn about specialty inks and specialty printing methods. I'll explain the different methods of color separation. I'll talk about the different methods of printing, like direct to garment, dye sublimation and screen printing. Sometimes the best way to learn is just to get your hands dirty. In my favorite part of this workshop, I'll guide you through the whole process of screen printing a T-shirt. The more you understand the possibilities and options you have with design, the better designer you'll be. The great thing about this workshop is it's online, so it's available anytime you'd like to watch and you can go at your own pace. Sign up for my T-shirt design workshop, I think you're going to learn a lot of things you didn't know about teacher design and it's going to be a lot of fun. 2. Every T Shirt Has A Story: What I'll do in this section is show you some of my work and I'll tell you some stories about how those graphics came about. This one is based of the California flag, it's watercolor and pencil. A lot of times if you do a design that's received well, the next season, you'll be asked to make an update. Here's the same concept, but more of the pen line style and here's the same idea, but it's been reversed printed, which means it's been screen printed on the inside of the shirt and when you print that way, you automatically get a really nice texture effect. Here's how it looks, white ink on a black shirt. Here's a marlin sketch done with a pigment liner style of pen. Here's another way to do marlin drawing, this one's a three color design, this one was done partially on paper, then it was brought into the computer and finished off with a drawing tablet. Here's a sailfish design I did, another designer design the type, and then I added in the sailfish and then also added some texture to blend the two styles together. Here's some hands-on elements. These ended up in a woven shirt and also a T-shirt design. Here's an old Ford Bronco design I did for a locomotion. You'll see the surfboard stack on top of the truck, and there's also some lettering in the shadow, and if you look close, there's some plastic assault ink cracking. This was added in as a texture in the computer to simulate old worn and washed ink. I got this idea from just walking down the street in Hawaii, I saw this Ford Bronco parked on the side of the road and I saw the surfboard racks on top and I thought that might make a really good T-shirt design. You can see here I've manipulated the photo, added in a surfboard stack on top of the truck, and change the license plate. Here's another Bronco with some surfboards on top. Both of these photos were taken with a cell phone camera, which just goes to show you, you don't necessarily need a high-end camera to take photos for your T-shirts. A fancy camera can help, but you don't necessarily need one. Here's some guys I saw it down at San unafraid pushing an old truck with some surfboards in the back. I just photoshopped out the guys and added a half tone texture to it. I took this photo using a water housing in Australia and here's how it looks turned into a T-shirt design. Here's another photo I took with my water housing in California, and then I combined it up with the blue watercolor background and then a logo design on top. This was out on the south shore of Mali, you can see the canoe paddlers in the background, there's a palm tree and just took that photo into Photoshop, added some palm leaves on the top left and then added a distress border all the way around it. Here's a photo I took out in Santa Cruz at a surf spot called Pleasure point, and I really like the bicycle with a surfboard rack on it, so I just took that bike hand drew over it, added some lettering and turn it into a T-shirt design. Bali is such a good place for inspiration. Here's a stone carve statue and some wood curve doors in the background. If you ever get a chance to go, you should also go check out the Deus Ex Machina surf and motorcycle shop, such a great place for inspiration. They have a lot of art up on the walls, they've got surfboards, they've got clothing, they've got motorcycles, and these surfboards make for excellent color, pattern and texture inspiration. There's some really good type inspiration up on the wall, and this is in the motorcycle shop. These are spray paint stencils on some wooden boxes, but I think the spray paint stencils would also make for a good T-shirt design. When I'm designing graphics, I usually start with really small thumbnail sketches. Then I scan an n and blow it up to a larger size, and then draw over it and refine it. Here I added some texture and some shading, and here's what it looks like in the final design. Here's some type I did for Billbong. Here's more type I did for Billabong and more type I did for Billbong. The best way to improve your designs is just a practice and try to make things in different styles, color things differently, draw them differently with different techniques, different pencils, paint brushes, you can use a drawing tablet, you can use spray paint, you can use ink, you can use almost anything that you can scan back in or take a photo of to get it back into the computer. Here's a hand drawn sketch for an O'Neill logo, and here I've added some texture, and this is what it looks like as a T-shirt design. Here's something I did for my company, I took a really clean vector lettering design, printed it out, and then smear the ink. That's one thing you can do with your clean vector designs is print them out, mess them up, add some texture, draw over them, then I scan it back in, added some half tone texture, and then finished it off with a red to black gradient. Another good way to add some texture to a really clean vector logo is to send out that design and get a stamp made, and then just make ink stamps and you have some instant texture. Here's the type design I did for O'Neill called chopsticks, and it has two orange bars weaving in and out of the type with some shading. If you're interested in that type design, checkout my typographic logos workshop, you can find that on Ray Dombrowski.com. Here's another way to do that design, I added some bad photocopy texture. I was lucky enough to get to work on the Billabong Pipe Masters T-shirts. The Pipe Masters is the premier surf contests, it's like the Super Bowl of surfing. I worked on this design with another designer at Billabong, and we use Brian Bellman's famous photo of Andy Irons. Here's a photo I took a pipeline. If you want to get really good photos for your T-shirts, sometimes you just have to travel to the right locations, and Hawaii is probably one of the best places to get surfing photos. Here's a type design I did, I added some texture and a little palm tree in the o. Any little hooks are tricks you can do to your type just to make it interesting, I think is a good thing. Here's a Spanglish design I did for O'Neill, and this is a sketch for the update, and here's one more idea in that same realm. Party Wave, this design did really well for Billabong, and the thing about this design is they ended up updating it and updating it and updating it season after season. They made it into a women's shirt. First it was a men shirt, then it ended up in board shorts and then ended up in store displays and this design was around for a couple years, and I think the guys working on Billabong after me just really got sick of it, and then somebody knocked it off for Shaun White in target and that was the end of that idea. Shark attack, the man's attacking the shark instead of vice versa. Anytime you can juxtapose things, or flip things, or just do something a little bit unexpected, I think that's a good thing. Uncle Sam thrown the Hawaiian shock assign. Here's a stack of red and white surfboards hand drawn for a 4th of July American flag look. I mentioned earlier one of my favorite things about T-shirt design is traveling for photoshoots and inspiration. But the other really fun thing is after you do these designs, you'll get strike offs back from the printer and it's almost like opening a birthday present and unpackaging that design can be so much fun. If you'd like to see that, be sure to enroll in my other class, the T-shirt design workshop Part 2. One of my other favorite things about T-shirt design is actually spotting someone out in public wearing your design. The neat thing about that is it's a thrill and it's also just nice to see that someone liked your design enough to go buy it and to put it on and wear it. 3. History of the T Shirt: Let's talk about the history of the t-shirt, where it came from, and when people started printing graphics on the t-shirts. Sometime in the 1800s, the t-shirt evolved from underwear, and by 1898, it was standard issue uniform for soldiers in the US Navy. This photo right here is probably about 1912 or 1913. After that, it became popular as a work shirt for agricultural workers, mechanics, soldiers. The reason was it's a simple garment and it was easy to clean. The first printed t-shirt to get nationwide attention was this t-shirt worn by a soldier on the cover of the Life Magazine, July 13th, 1942 issue. Throughout the 1940s and World War II, soldiers would be known to decorate their own t-shirts. In 1951, the movie, A Streetcar Named Desire, featuring Marlon Brando came out. Brando wore a t-shirt in the movie, and this led to widespread popularity of the t-shirt. In 1955, James Dean wore a plain white t-shirt in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, adding to the popularity of the t-shirt. Tie-dye t-shirts were popularized in the 1960s by a man named Don Price, who was a marketing executive for the Rit Dye Company. They marketed this dye to hippies by giving out tie-dye t-shirts at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. This image of Che Guevara has become a symbol of protest. The original photo was taken in 1960. But in 1967, an artist named Jim Fitzpatrick gave an artistic rework to the photo, turning it into posters, and somewhere along the way, it became a very popular t-shirt design. In 1971, John Pasche designed the lips and tongue logo for The Rolling Stones. In 1974, John Lennon was photographed wearing this sleeveless New York City t-shirt. This design became so instantly iconic that not only the lettering design, but also the photo of John Lennon wearing the shirt has become a t-shirt design. In 1977, graphic designer, Milton Glaser designed the I Love New York shirt and to me I think this is probably the all-time most iconic, most recognized t-shirt that there is. Just to show you the beauty of your thumbnail sketches really doesn't matter, is, this is his napkin sketch for the I Love New York shirt. Very simple, not a lot of time wasted on this design, but it'll probably last forever. Led Zeppelin, I've always thought this is a very iconic design. Ramones t-shirt was designed in the 1970s by an artist named Arturo Vega. This is John Belushi in the movie Animal House in 1978 with his college shirt. Now this isn't a t-shirt, it's actually a crew neck sweatshirt. But I think it easily could be a t-shirt and it counts, so I'm putting it in the list here. Now, Harley-Davidson t-shirts have actually been around since, I think the 1950s. But this shirt and also the Harley-Davidson eagle became very popular in the 1980s as a symbol of American freedom. Sean's Tussey came out with this line of clothing in the 1980s. I think it was the beginning of modern surf and also modern street wear. Wrap started to gain mainstream popularity in the 1980s. I think this is one of the most iconic Wrap t-shirts, Run-DMC. 1985, the Screaming Hand by Jim Phillips. I think this is one of the most iconic skateboarding t-shirt designs. The Just Do It campaign from Nike started in 1988. I don't know if the popularity of this shirt is just the marketing muscle behind Nike or it's that people relate to the design and the saying. I think it's a combination of both. 1990s, Nirvana, smiley face logo, very iconic design. I think it's a little too early to say what the next iconic t-shirt is that will come along. But let's look at some more modern designs and what people are doing with t-shirts today. 4. Present Day T Shirt Design: In this section, I want to show you some examples of really cool designs, not necessarily because of the t-shirt graphic, but because of how they took all the elements that go into a t-shirt design and combine them together to make something really unique. This one here, they've taken what looks to be either a dip dye or a tie-dye and just overprinted some big numbers on it, and there's also a little so on label near the hem. Here's another dip dye. This thing is pretty crazy. You probably only wear once a year, on the 4th of July if you live in the US, I'll talk about these kind of shirts in the Garment Dye section of this class. This is a really cool look. It looks to me like it's been roll printed and it's cut and sew, and it's also reverse printed all at the same time. I'll explain those printing techniques in a later section. Here's an example of how you can take something really boring and just turn it into a classic tee. So all I did here was they printed the pocket with some stripes and a little logo and you've got a really nice looking shirt there. This one's another dip dye, and it looks like they've overprinted it with some lettering. Here's a nice cut and sew tee, basic logo on it. You can see they've piece together some fabric just above the logo, and it is also some stripes on the sleeves. Like this one, it's an unconventional type layout with a vertical type and the ink color of the tiger head matches the wrangling sleeves. You can take something humorous, printed really big. You don't even have to draw it really well. Here's some paint splatter. This one's been rolled printed. In a later section, I'll clue you into why I knew that. Here they've taken the most plain shirt in the world just a basic chess logo and they tie-dyed it, and now it's really cool. Here on this t-shirt they've taken a nice pattern, printed across the chest, and then soon a pocket over top. The exact same thinking when into this t-shirt. This looks to me like they took a picture of a hill or some waves or something and just printed it down on the helm. This one, they've taken some hand-drawn lettering and put like a watercolor effect in it. I love this shirt. It's probably roll printed, and it's definitely a cut and sew piece where they printed it first and then so the t-shirt together. Here's another example of a tie-dye, except what they did here was they just printed it with regular T-shirt ink. So it's not actually a tie-dye, that's just in the graphic. I love this shirt, it's so basic. But all they did was they took a really boring basic logo, printed it on the shirt, and then so to pocket over top. Now it's something to talk about. This looks like another cut-and-sew t-shirt, I just like how the stripes on the sleeves are thicker than the stripes on the front of the shirt. This one is so awesome, it just looks like they cut a hole in the black shirt and then sewed in a panel of white to just get a full flip-flop of black and white. What I hope you've seen in this section is an interesting T-shirt isn't just about the graphic, it's about the fabrics, inks, dyes, washes, specialty printing methods, oversized pruning, crazy construction methods. There's so many things you can do. What I'll do in these next sections is break all of these elements down, explain them, and then you'll better know how to combine them back up into your own unique design. 5. What makes a Good T Shirt Graphic: Let's talk about what makes a good t-shirt graphic. Number 1 is I think your t-shirt needs to be wearable. Now this is the one thing that makes t-shirt design different than other graphic design. It really depends on your customer, but it needs to be something that they feel comfortable and good about wearing. This also ties in with identity, which is very important for t-shirts. When somebody puts on a t-shirt, more than a lot of other things, it represents their identity. If you're into rock climbing or music or gardening or playing sports, people will buy a t-shirt based on that identity. It's almost like, "Hey, I'm a member of this community." You need to be very aware of the likes and dislikes of your demographic. The other thing is color. You need to pay attention to what colors look good. Fashion trends and colors change all the time, so you need to stay up and aware on that. The other thing with t-shirt design is you need to think about composition. If you think about most t-shirt graphics, they're self-contained graphics. It might be like a center chest or it might be a pocket hit, or might be back hit, or little side hit or something like that. But unless the graphic goes off of the t-shirt, it's it self-contained piece, so composition is very important. The overall shape, the weight of letters, or the look of a photograph. Now if you're trying to get a message across, readability is also very important. In most cases, you want your type or your lettering to be very readable and there's a lot of things that go into readability, but mainly its letter forms and also color of the ink on the t-shirt. 6. Kinds of Fabric: Let's talk about T-shirt fabric. With T-shirt fabric, in general, you're talking about three different kinds of fabric. You're talking about cottons, you're talking about polyester cotton blends or you're talking about tri blends. Cotton is the most basic and common T-shirt fabric. The higher grades of cotton are called ring spun and combed, and those tend to print better and feel softer than a lower grade of cotton like a carded cotton. Cottons tend to print really well with traditional printing methods and traditional inks like water-base or plasticizer inks. A poly cotton is a blend of polyester and cotton, and you'll get different ratios of cotton to polyester. Now, there are 100 percent polyester shirts. Typically, those are reserved for sublimation printing and I'll talk about that in a later section. With the poly cotton blends, you typically get what's known as a heathered look, and the reason for that heathered look is when the fabric goes through the dye process, the dye only adheres to either the poly or the cotton fibers and because of that, you'll get a two tone look to the fabric. A tri blend fabric is a mix of cotton, polyester and either rayon or viscose. Much like the poly cotton blends, you also get a heathered look with a lot of the tri blends and that's also because the dye process, certain dyes only adhere to certain kinds of fibers. This one is known as a mach twist tri blend and it gives you a little bit different texture to the colors in the fabric. Those are your three main kinds of fabric. There's also some blends with lycra or spandex for active wear. There's also fabrics made from bamboo which is really soft. There's also hemp fabric and linen fabric. But in general, you're talking about the cottons, the polyesters and the tri blends. Now, each type of fabric prints a little differently. Cottons tend to print the best, polyesters print better with sublimation and the tri blends I've found are better when using one or two ink colors because they don't take the ink quite as well. But check with your screen printer, they have experience and they know what kinds of inks work well with what kinds of fabrics. 7. T Shirt Construction: Let's talk about T-Shirt construction. What I'm talking about here are off-the-shelf blanks. This is a men's crew neck tee, but there's all kinds of different ways that these can be sewn together. For instance, this one has a side seam, which is kind of the mark of a more premium tee, and the reason is with a side seem, you're able to control the fit a little better. Let's go into the basics and I'll show you what those are. First, we have the basic crew neck, and this is a V neck, and this kind of t-shirt is called a ringer because it has a contrast color and contrast cuffs on the sleeves. This is called a scoop neck tee. It's also called a boat neck tee or just a wide neck tee. This is a three-quarter sleeve wrangling, and a wrangling shirt is a baseball shirt. What makes it different is how the sleeves are attached to the shirt, they come up at an angle. This shirt with the buttons is called a Henley. Here's a variation of a men's crew neck t-shirt. This one you'll see has a contrast color with matching sleeves and a matching pocket. Here's a men's long-sleeved crew neck t-shirt. With all the t-shirts I've shown you, there are also long-sleeved versions. That's the basics of off-the-shelf t-shirt bodies, but check with your vendor. There's a lot of specialty off-the-shelf blanks that you can get. 8. Garment Dye: This section is about garment dye. Garment dye is where they dye the shirt after it's been sewn into a t-shirt. In contrast to piece dyeing, piece dyeing is where they dye the fabric before it's ever sewn into a t-shirt. There's a lot of fun things you can do with garment dye. I'll show you a few examples starting from the most basic. Then we'll go to some pretty wild ones. The first dye I want to show you is called a pigment dye. A pigment dye adds color to the t-shirt. This one's got a nice distressed washed look to it. Here's the same pigment dye, just in another color. Here's a pigment dye with a really saturated indigo blue. Dip dye is one of my favorite kinds of dye. It's just where they dip one end of the shirt into a vat of dye and they let the dye seep up the shirt and it creates a natural gradient effect. Here's another dip dye and you can see that they screen printed after the dip dye. The most well-known garment dye is a tie dye. This is a very standard, well-known kind of tie dye. I like this one. It's a little more reserved and they have a small screen print on the chest. Here's another tie dye with a print on the front. You can get some really nice patterns with these tie dyes like this one. Here's a really fun one from Native. They've done a screen print of a top. This tie dye is really neat. It's off to the side of the shirt, much like the wash houses. If you're getting a special garment dye, a lot of times your screen printer will send out the shirts to a dye house. A dye house is just a business that specializes in making garment dyes. Here's a specialty dye from Mobley. I know the guys from Mobley do a lot of working with the dye house to come up with specialty dyes. Here's another really nice one from Mobley. This is a similar dye process but it also has a screen print on top of it. This one, it looks like they applied the dye by hand with either sponges or rollers. This is what they call a marble dye. The thing about these specialty garment dyes is you'll always get a different result and each t-shirt will be completely different, which I think adds to the value of that t-shirt. 9. Yarn Dye: Yarn dye is when the manufacturer of the fabric dyes the yarns as they're being knit into the T-shirt jersey fabric. If you've ever seen a T-shirt where it looks like it's knit with two colors, and it's not screen printed and it's not pieced together by selling, that's a yarn dye. Here's a great example of what you can do with yarn dye. This is a pocket up close. If you look at the top, there's an indigo fabric, then it goes to a heather gray, then it goes to a charcoal, then it goes to a plain white, and at the bottom it goes to a red and white space dye. So that's what a space dye looks like. Here's another space dye, very colorful and contrasty, and you can see it's got a dark blue, a medium blue, an orange, and a white. Here's the yarn dye shirt with a space dye in the stripes. You can screen print a graphic on top of a yarn dye shirt just like you can any other T-shirt fabric. It's just another thing to be aware of when you're looking for options for your T-shirt designs. 10. Garment Washes: Let's talk about garment washes. Garment washes are when they take t-shirts that are already sewn together and wash them to create vintage or distressed effects. One of the best examples of this is with denim jeans. If you think about a stone wash, its taking color out of the denim. If you're getting a wash applied to your t-shirts, normally, what will happen is, your screen printer will contract out with a place called a wash house. Let me show you a few examples here and you'll get a better idea of what you can do with washes. The first wash we have here is a burnout wash. This is a very standard wash, and it was very popular a few years ago. What happens with a burn-out wash is you take a poly-cotton tee that's a mix of polyester and cotton, and the wash will eat away some of the cotton, leaving only the polyester fibers. You get this really textured look. Depending on the color of the shirt and the ratio of polyester to cotton, you'll get different looks. Here's a burnout wash on a black shirt, and this is a lighter burnout wash on a blue shirt. The next garment wash is an enzyme wash. This just applies a nice vintage garage look to your t-shirt. The next wash is a mineral wash, this is a very common wash also, and it gives you this look. This is a light mineral wash. The effect isn't quite as obvious. Here's another mineral wash, done on a very saturated color shirt. You get more of a contrasted look with this mineral wash. The next wash is called an oil wash, and here's what an oil wash looks like. Here's what's called a bleach wash. This is a more extreme wash where you're taking more color out of the fabric, and here's how the same wash looks on a black shirt. I found this wash. It's called a paint wash, and it looks to me like they may be adding colors, it may be a dye-wash combination. 11. Direct to Garment Printing: In this section, we'll talk about direct to garment printing and I'll talk about what direct to garment printing is, what are the advantages, what are the disadvantages, when would you want to use it and when would you not want to use it. First of all, direct to garment pruning is inkjet printing on T-shirts. The machine looks just like a big inkjet printer that you've put on paper but instead what you do is you take a T-shirt, you load it onto a Platon, onto a tray and feed it into the machine. It simply prints out your design just like an inkjet printer would on paper. Right here I have a direct to garment printed shirt that I got from the brother rep at the Agenda trade show. It's really hard to tell the difference between a direct to garment printed T-shirt and a screen printed shirt. The process for this shirt is pretreating it with a chemical that allows the water-based ink to soak into the fibers of the shirt. Then it's loaded onto the Platon, this tray that goes into the direct garment machine and the inkjet heads print out the color of the shirt and then the shirt removed and then put in a heat press for about 35 seconds. The nice thing about direct to garment is there's no color limitations. If you think about your inkjet at home, you can print out a photo with millions of colors, same thing with the DTG machine. If you're printing on a dark garment, it'll print an underbase, and then immediately after, it'll print all your colors, your CMYK. There's no big setup like there is with screen printing. All you have to do is pretreated the shirt, load the shirt, and then once it's printed, take it out and heat set it. There's a lot more initial setup with screen printing because you have to take the art, you have to separate it, you have to make films, you have to make screens and then you have to actually set up the press and have someone load the t-shirts and operate the press. But once you have that going, screen printing is a lot faster and cheaper. Again, if you're doing a small batch of shirts, then go DTG and if you're doing more than a 100 or so, you should go screen printing. Directed garment is perfect as a sales tool for sampling. It's also perfect for smaller companies selling directly to the consumer because there's no middleman. If you run a company that has a website that sells to the end customer and it cost you, say, $8 to make a direct to garment shirt, you can still sell that T-shirt for $20 and you're still making more than a 50 percent markup. The other downside to direct to garment pruning is the print size right now is maxed out at 16 by 18 inches, so you can't do like an all overprint or an oversized print. The other downside to direct to garment is the lack of specialty inks. A screen printing it could do like glitter inks, glow in the dark inks, you can do a clear gel, there's all inks that work with screen printing that won't work with direct to garment right now, but I think that'll change as time goes on and the technology gets better. 12. Dye Sublimation Printing: In this section, let's talk about sublimation printing. Sublimation is one of my favorite ways to print a T-shirt. There are a lot of limitations, which I'll talk about in a little bit but first let's talk about what sublimation is. Sublimation is when you print a design onto a special sublimation paper, they take that printed transfer sheet and sandwich it with your T-shirt and heat press it, and the heat pressing makes the dye adhere to the T-shirt. The nice thing about sublimation is there no color limitations, and you don't have to do any screen separations like you do with silk screening. The other thing I like about it is there's no hand or feel or roughness or thickness to the print. Now, the thing about sublimated T-shirt is it only works with shirts that have a polyester content, so you can't do sublimation on 100 percent cotton tee. If you print on a shirt that's a 100 percent polyester, you'll get the brightest and most saturated colors. You can also sublimate on polyester blends like a poly cotton shirt, so let's say you had a 20 percent polyester shirt, 80 percent cotton, the design will be very subdued, it'll be very light. Let me show you a few examples. This is an example of a photo print on a sublimated shirt. Based on the saturation of the color, I think this is probably 100 percent polyester shirt. Another limitation with sublimation is it's expensive, so what people do a lot of times is just print on the front and not on the back. I don't think that's the best look for a T-shirt, but sometimes you can get away with it depending on the design. This may be like a 30 percent polyester shirt and that's why it looks like. But I think that's a good thing because this print otherwise would be so bright and so loud that you would only be able to wear at, say, like a pool party or something like that. Here's another subdued sublimated print, probably printed on a 30, 40 percent polyester shirt. This one again is really nice, this has taken a photographic design, printed really like. One of the limitations with sublimation is you can only print it on a light-colored T-shirt, a white, a light blue, a light gray, a light yellow, something like that. But the way around it is, if you want a black shirt, what you'll do is your sublimation print that you print on a paper will have that black dye already in it, so you're basically going from a white shirt and printing that black. This Neff shirt with the fishing lowers on it, they printed the black background along with all the colors in that sublimation. It's not like a screen print where you have to separate the colors, they printed this all in one shot. This is a light brown polycotton shirt, you can see how the print goes over the color. This print was done on the T-shirt after it's sewn up and this is a nice effect that you can get with sublimation. Another limitation to sublimation is if you print it on a shirt that's office shelf, a shirt that's already constructed, it's already cut and sewn together where that transfer paper meets the shirt, if there's a little fold in the shirt, you'll get these little crease marks in your print, and how you set up your design will really affect if that's a problem or not. If you do a really subtle print like this, you're not going to really notice these crease lines so much. But if you have a really saturated area and it's in the area where you'll get a lot of crease marks, most of the crease marks you'll get are in the armpits, in the side seems, in the shoulder area. But the way around to getting these wrinkles is to print fabric panels before they're sewn into the T-shirt, so what they'll do is, they'll get flat panels of fabric, sublimate those, then cut the fabric, and then sew it together into a T-shirt. Here's the design that I absolutely love, so what I think they did was they took an old Aloha shirt and scanned it, and then took that scan and printed that onto the sublimation paper, took the sublimation paper with blue fabric, sublimated it, and then cut those panels of fabric and sewed it together. You'll notice how the color is just the blue color of the T-shirt fabric, but the shirt itself has a little bit of a yellow tinge to it in most of the areas, and the reason is there's just yellow in that sublimation print. This is a really nice soft shirt to wear. That's sublimation. Again, it's good for small print runs on light shirts with some polyester content. If you need a lot of color, you don't want thickness of the ink, and you don't mind spending a little bit more. 13. Oversize Printing: In this section, let's talk about oversize printing and custom construction techniques. First, we'll talk about cut and sew t-shirts. Cut and sew is the opposite of an off the shelf blank. So when you buy a T-shirt off the shelf, it's already constructed, it already has the hem and the sleeves and everything sewn together. With cut and sew, at least partially you're sewing together something that wasn't together before. For instance, this T-shirt has a knit panel sewn on the back. This panel, it's a little bit thicker fabric than the T-shirt jersey. It's got a matching pocket, and then this T-shirt has a woven pocket. So it's like a woven fabric that's sewn on. The thing with cut and sew is you can combo it up with printing and you can get some really nice effects. Now, granted, when you do cut and sew with printing, it typically is pretty expensive. So you may have to do it overseas or you may have to do it in high production runs to make it cost effective. So this T-shirt, the sleeves are printed and then it was sewn onto the T-shirt. Same thing with a pocket. The pocket was printed, then it was sewn onto the T-shirt afterwards. This one was probably roll printed. What they do is they just get a giant long roll of fabric, and in this case, they have polka dots printed on it. With roll printing, if you're not worried about where those polka dots actually land on the fabric, then you can roll print it. So it was roll printed, and then the T-shirt was cut out and then it was sewn together. This is a van shirt that was roll printed with an Aztec print. This is another version of that shirt where they use the same fabric to sew on a pocket. This is a raglan version where they took that same fabric and sewed it into a baseball team silhouette. So it's got the raglan sleeves on it. This is another shirt with a roll print of the fabric with these polka dots. They sewed on contrast sleeves and also a brown pocket and then put a little embroidery above the pocket. This one was probably not cheap and it was probably done overseas. When you have this stripe, that stripe has to hit right across the chest and that seam is clean. So this thing was probably panel printed, which means it was a small square of fabric, the size of the shirt that was printed, then they sewed it together. This is a tie-dye that was cut and sew. So at the top by the shoulders is shear fabric and then the panel of tie-dye below that. This is another cut and sew shirt where there's a panel off to one side that is cut in sewn. So you have this offset stripe. Here we have a printed panel. It's like an a low high sheer print and it's sewn into the T-shirt and then a pocket is sewn on top. This one, I believe the stripes were printed. Then you'll notice how the hem isn't horizontal like on a normal shirt. It actually dips down to one side. So this is kind of a fashion tee. You'll also notice that the pocket has a stripe at an angle. This one looks like a panel printed shirt, so they screen printed these stripes onto a panel of the shirt, then they sewed the shirt together. Then they sewed a pocket on top of that. This raglan shirt has a bandana print on the sleeves, and it's also got a chest screen print on the front and then a contrast color. Now this cut and sew shirt is pretty special. The sleeves and the color were airbrushed by hand and then sewn onto the shirt. Now we'll talk about faux cut and sew and ways to get around the high price of cut and sew T-shirts. This one, it looks more like a fancy cut and sew, but actually it was a traditional screen print on a regular screen printing machine on an off-the-shelf blank. The way you can tell is these stripes don't go to the side seam. So this was traditionally printed, but then they added a knit pocket which makes it look really nice. This was an oversized print and it's not engineered, it's not cut and sew, and it actually doesn't have a side seam. So the way they did this was they just screen printed this half tone pattern on it, which is really cool, it's really subtle. Then just for extra value, a pocket was sewn on top after the screen printing. Now, the other thing you can do is you can screen print and then sew a pocket on top of it or you can just screen print right over the pocket, but again, where the seams are, where the stitching is, you'll get some blotchiness. That may be a good thing or bad thing. It's a good thing if you plan it and you want it to be blotchy and rough. Speaking of blotchy and rough, this one also was an oversized print that was not cut in sewn. They did a pretty good job of printing it right to the side seam and then stopping. There's some distress in the graphic, which makes it end pretty nicely. So anyway, that's a really cool shirt. 14. Screen Printing Inks: Now let's talk about screen printing inks. The most common ink is called plastisol, and it's actually the easiest to use as far as a screen printer is concerned. It'll actually hold a high amount of detail, so you can use it with a very fine mesh silkscreen. The other nice thing about plastisol is, it's very opaque and you can get really bright colors, especially when you're printing on dark shirts. If you're printing with more transparent ink, like a soft hand plastisol, which I'll talk about in a minute, or if you're printing with water-base inks, it's harder to get vibrant colors on a dark shirt. I think plastisol gets a bad rap because of the way that it's printed. Here's probably the worst example and actually a really cool example at the same time. This shirt was printed with plastisol, and this is a vintage shirt I picked up at a flea market. It's just really thick and shiny print. Now the nice thing about a shirt like this is, if you find one, you can go and you can scan all the little cracks and turn those into textures and make your t-shirt designs look really cool if you trying to go for a vintage look. But there's ways to do plastisol where it's not quite so thick. Let me show you another vintage example. Now this one has the same cool looking cracks in it. This is an old, I think a 80s Harley Davidson shirt, and this still has a cracks but it's not quite as thick, and definitely not as shiny as the other one. Then here's a modern shirt. Sometimes it's just difficult to print on a black shirt because you have to put down what's called an under base. Sometimes they also call it a flash or flash plate. What's going on is they're adding just a white under base, under the whole graphic. This graphic is a square. So the first thing that they're going to print is a big square of white ink, and then they'll flash that. Meaning, they'll actually heat cure the ink while it's still on the press. Then they'll go and print on the other colors on top of that. Now that can sometimes lead to a really thick print because you've got the white ink and then you've got the other colors on top of that. This one's not too bad. They did a pretty good job with this. After a couple of washes, it'll probably feel pretty good. Let me show you another example. Now this is a really nice way to print plastisol ink and we call this like, this one has a lot of air, meaning you've got areas in the print where it just goes back to fabric color. That's just a really good way to do print. If you can ever think of ways to print graphics and have a t-shirt color come through in areas, that'll help with the thickness. Now again, this one was printed on a white shirt, so it's actually pretty easy. They don't have to put down a lot of ink to make it look nice and bright and vibrant. Just another example, this is a van shirt. It looks like they just did an orange stripe and then they overprinted the black photo. This hardly has any hand at all. I mentioned before, soft hand plastisol, and with soft hand plastisol is an ink formulation that's just a lot softer than a regular plastisol. Now, it's not going to be quite as opaque. The other trick you can do is what's called a discharge mask instead of the flash plate or the white plastisol under base. With a discharge under base, what you're doing is you're taking the dye out of the shirt. Now this is what a discharge will look like because you're going down to the raw cotton, it's not a 100 percent white. You can combo up soft hand plastisol with a discharge under base, and that'll give you a pretty soft hand shirt that's really nice. Soft hand plastisol is a little easier to use than water base. The thing about water base is, you have to use a lower resolution screen, you have to use basically a coarser screen. You're not going to get quite the detail out of it. It will be very soft hand, but it's not going to be quite as opaque as the plastisol inks, and your screen printer will find it a little hard to work with. You can't really leave the water base ink on the screen for very long before it's going to actually dry on the screen. There's a lot more problems with printing water base ink and it has to do a lot with the temperature and the humidity, and there's just a lot more headaches to deal with. But if you can get a good water base print done and your screen printer doesn't mind, and it looks nice, I would say, go for that because you're going to get a really nice soft feel to it. 15. Specialty Inks and Printing Techniques: Now let's talk about specialty inks and printing methods. What I'm talking about here are novelty inks, or novelty printing methods. The first one I have here is a gold foil. You can get foil in a range of colors. Foil can be somewhat expensive. The bigger you print, the more it costs. With foil, your screen printing and adhesive, and the foil comes in rolls or sheets. You're applying the foil to the adhesive, to adhere it to the shirt. This is metallic ink, it's not quite as shiny as foil, but it does cost a lot less. For now, metallic ink is only screen print, you can't do it with directed garment. That leads us to glitter and glitters what it sounds like, it's just a glitter ink that can be screened printed. This one is a gel ink combined with glitter, so you have a glitter gel. Then there's puff ink. Puff ink you'll notice looks puffy it's got a rounded edge, where it puffs up. Here's one of my favorite examples of puff ink. They took basically some art that look like a rope, and when the puff ink is applied, it puffs up and you still have that rope texture. But that rope texture is in the spacing of the art, really cool effect. In contrast to puff ink is high density ink. The big difference you'll notice is high density ink has more of a sharp edge. You don't see a lot of high density ink these days I think people prefer not feeling the ink or application on the shirt, but using moderation can be a really nice effect. I do like the combination of this line art with the high density ink here. To me, this looks like two layers of high density ink, you can even screen print regular plastisol ink on top of high-density ink. Here's what metallic ink looks like screen printed on top of a high density ink. Here we have suede ink. Suede ink has a suede leather sort of soft feel to the print. This is known as flock or flocking, and this solid print is pretty out of fashion right now. But the way flocking works is an adhesive, is screen printed onto the shirt, and then little fibers are applied to that adhesive, so you get a fuzzy effect. But there are still cool ways to do flocking, you can do a logo like this. This flock has a gradient color applied to it. I like this technique, this is irregular plastisols all print with the letters. Then inside as sort of a distressed area that has the flocking. You can even apply flocking to a puff ink, and this is how that looks. This is glow in the dark ink, and the thing about glow in the dark is it'll have a little bit of a green tint to it, and even though it's transparent, you'll see that green tint during the day. This is solar ink, and the way it works is you have a shirt on left and that's what it looks like indoors. But as soon as you go outside and UV ultraviolet light hits it from the sun, all these colors that are screen printed there that were invisible before brighten up. It's a really dramatic effect. If this solar ink is printed on a white shirt, you will not see it at all until you go into the sun. You could have a totally blank t-shirt that looks blank indoors, and when you go outside, the colors brighten up, really cool ink. This is an old school heat transfer, these are just heat transfer letters. Airbrushed shirts were really common back in the 70s and 80s, but here's a current-day mobley shirt that's got a really nice airbrushed. Crackle ink, I'm sure you've seen lots of t-shirts with a cracked ink look. The reason people do this is to emulate vintage washed and worn shirts that were printed with plastisol. With crackle link, it's an additive added to the plastisol, that makes it more brittle and that way you get a cracked effect. The other way to get that effect is to use a texture in your art. I think this is a bad example actually, it just doesn't look that authentic as far as the cracks go. By the way, if you're looking for good textures, I have a collection of crafting textures called plastisol and that's on my website, thevectorlab.com. These ones are really good, they were created by scanning the ink on old vintage shirts. The thing about crackle ink is you do not have any control over how the ink cracks. The nice thing about that is each t-shirt will look different. But what I've seen a lot of people do lately is add in a texture in art and combine that with a crackle ink. Here's a Roark shirt, you can see the diagonal texture is in the art, but then the other cracks are in the crackle ink. Pretty cool, this is an even better example where you'll notice the larger, more vertical cracks, those are in the art, and then the smaller cracks are in the crack ink. This is one of the best examples I've seen of the texture and crackle ink combination. This technique is really hot right now, it's called reverse printing. With reverse printing, what you're doing is flipping the t-shirt inside out and you're pushing that ink through the shirt so it shows up on the other side. It's got a really nice natural texture to it, very appealing. Here's a couple more examples of reverse print, you'll get different results with reverse printing depending on how light or dark this shirt is. Typically with a dark shirt, you need to press through more ink to get it to show up. On the left side here, it looks like they pushed through a lot more ink than the shirt on the right. There's a ton of other specialty inks and methods that I didn't cover here. But those are the main ones, and what you'll want to do is when you go to your screen parent, ask them what they can do. Every screen printer will have different capabilities as far as specialty inks and special effects. 16. How Color Separations Work: In this section, let's talk about color separations or screen separations, and those are the same thing. What I'm talking about here is when you screen print a T-shirt, if you need to put down more than one ink color, each screen on the press is a different color, depending on how you want your design to look will determine what color separation method you want to use. The different kinds of color separation are, a simple spot color would be your number one. Number two is processed separations. Number three is simulated process, and number four is index separations. Let's just start out with a simple spot color separation. This is my company's logo and let's say I wanted to print it onto a white T-shirt. I want the background of the circle to be black, and I want the letters to be yellow. Since this is a clean vector design, it's really simple to make separations. You make one screen with the letters and one screen with a background and that's all you do. Spot colors is not just limited to logos, you can also do spot color separations with photo based designs. Here's an example with a Ford Bronco, and this is a three color design. You've got the gray shirt, you've got a white screen, you've got a blue screen, and you've got a black screen. If your screen printing this, you'd start with a white, then you'd add your blue, and then you'd screen on the black. Very simple. Here is another method that's the next notch up in complexity. It's a simple spot color with half tone. Half-tones are dot patterns that allow you to make gradients between two colors. I've exaggerated the half tone pattern in this example to be bigger, so it's more visible to you, but you can make the half-tones really small, or if you want them as a decorative part to your design, you can make the half-tones really big. How this separation is made is, there's the letters, there's the top half tone, and there's the bottom half tone, but let's say we want to print this design on a black shirt or a dark shirt. A lot of times with a black shirt or dark shirt, you'll want an under base, and what the under base is, is a screen of white ink that allows you to print your other colors on top. Now let's talk about CMYK or process separations, and this is good for photo real designs or designs with a lot of color that are going on a white shirt. A lot of screen printers have software that will generate the CMYK half-tones for them, but what I've done is I've manually generated these in Photo-shop. This is the same way a color photo in a magazine would be printed, and let me zoom in here and show you the half tone dots and have a look at my layers. I have a cyan, magenta, yellow, and black layer. Let me just strip away all the layers except for the cyan, so you can see how these half tone patterns look. They're diagonal patterns of dots. I've got a cyan, I've got a magenta, I've got a yellow, and I've got a black. When you layer all these up, it creates your image, and the more you zoom in, the less it looks like a photo, but the more you zoom out, the more it looks like a photo. If these were printed on a shirt, you really wouldn't see those dots so much. The thing about these CMYK designs is they all have half-tones and you're relying on the transparency of the ink colors to create in-between colors. You'll see some green in here, and all that is, is a mix of the cyan and the yellow. Since we're creating this image from the transparency of how the cyan, yellow, magenta, and black are interacting, if you change one of those colors, let's say you're on the screen printing press and you change that cyan, that blue to an orange, you might think it's just going to change the color of the sky, but actually what happens in a CMYK image is if you were to change that cyan to a bright orange, it would affect the whole picture because all of those cyan half-tones are now orange, so it affects the whole image. Simulated process is very similar to CMYK, but it's for printing on the dark shirts, and you're not necessarily using cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. This is a vintage Harley Davidson graphic that is simulated process. You'll see there's white in the eagle head, there's blue in the feathers, there's a couple different oranges in the beak and if you look really close, you can see those half-tones dots in the design. Notice how the black in the feathers here, that's the black of the t-shirt color, and it's showing through. When you're designing, it's always good to let the t-shirt color come into your design, that way you're saving color and you're also making a nicer, softer shirt that's just not all a 100 percent ink. It's good to have some of that fabric color showing through. The last kind of separations we have are called index separations. Index separations are also very good for photographic images, but they're a little different and I'll show you how they work. This is a regular photograph, it's a JPEG. Now this is the same photo and its index down to four colors, including the white. There's a blue, there's a black, there's a white, and there's a green, and that's it. I'll flip back to the other one. You'll notice there's a little bit of yellow missing when I flip back and forth. I have another version where it's index down to five colors, so now that yellow is added in, and it's fairly close to the original, You can tell depending on your screen, it's a little bit different, but if this were printed on a t-shirt, it would look really good. What makes an index separation different than a CMYK separation? First of all, an index separation, you can print on any color shirt, it doesn't matter if it's white or black, or blue or anywhere in between. The other thing I've zoomed in on the palm leaf very close, and you'll notice that there are pixels in here, but there aren't half tone dots like there were in the CMYK image. In the index image, these are more random pixels as opposed to spaced half tone dots in the CMYK. Another thing that makes index separations different than CMYK, is that, let's say I take this blue and change it to orange, it just changes the sky so these ink colors art is interrelated on this kind of design. Just to go further, I can change the palms to blue. Again, it doesn't mess up the image, it just changes the colors of where it was green to blue now, and let's say I wanted to make the clouds yellow. I could do that too. Here's what it looks like if I change that black screen to a dark royal blue. 17. Screen Printing Supplies: Now we're going to talk about basic screen printing supplies, and after that, I'll talk about how they work. I think the best way to learn about screen printing is to actually get your hands dirty. The funnest and cheapest way to do that is to get a little hobby craft kit. You can get something like this at Michaels or Amazon for about 50 bucks. If you go to Michaels, you could probably get it for 50 percent off of that. It's a really good way to learn and I recommend everybody try this because everything that's in this kit and in this process will translate to commercial screen printing. You'll know what your screen printer is talking about, when you are trying to decide different screen printing methods, and just everything about the process. Anyway, let me show you what's in this kit, and I'll show you a few other things you're going to need. First of all, you've got your screen or your silkscreen. This is exactly what you would see in a commercial screen printing business. They may have metal frames and they all have all different sizes. The next thing that comes with this craft kit is a squeegee. This is a real basic, cheap one. This one's a little better, and you'll see ones with wooden handles. You'll also see ones that are just machine operated, so it won't even be hand pulled by human. The next thing you have is emulsion and emulsion remover. What emulsion is, is it's a glue that coats the screen. Actually, I'll talk about that and a little bit too. We also have our ink. These are plaster solve fabric inks. With fabric you can also do water base, but I'll also talk about that in the inks section of this class. There's a few things that you need that don't come with this kit. This is a bud light, and the reason you need this is for your darkroom. When you're working with the emulsion, it's light sensitive, and you need to be able to see in your darkroom. This will allow you to see, but it won't expose the emulsion, and I'll show you that a little bit later. You'll need something to expose your light-sensitive emulsion, and this is a 300 watt photo flood bulb that'll work. You can also use fluorescence, you can also use black lights. There's all kinds of different things you can use, but each different light will have a different exposure time. This one, for instance, takes about 15 minutes to expose your emulsion on your screen, and I'll show you that in a little bit. You'll also need light housing. This one is really cheap, you can get it at Home Depot for a few dollars. You can use this for your bud light for your darkroom, and you can also use one to expose your screen. The last supply you'll need is some transparency film, and this is film that you can print on with an inkjet printer, so you can also do this at home. Let's go into the supplies, and the process of screen printing, and I'll show you how it all works. 18. Screen Printing Process: Now that I've showed you the supplies, let's do a quick run through on how the screen printing process actually works. What you're going to do, is you're going to take a computer file, and it needs to be black and white. To keep this demonstration simple, we'll just use a one-color design. I've got this design with an old Ford Bronco, and what we do is we print that out onto a transparency that looks like this, and that's just out of the inkjet printer, and the reason we need to do this is our photo emulsion is light sensitive, so the black areas are going to block out the light when we expose the screen. Now, let me show you how we set up the screen. First of all, we take our blank screen and then we code it with liquid emulsion, so you want to get a nice even coverage on your screen, and then once you have that done, take it into the dark room and just let it dry for 20, 30 minutes. You could let it dry overnight if you want. When we get ready to expose the screen, what we do is, in our darkroom with a bug light on, we set up our screen like this with the transparency over it, and then once that's all positioned correctly, we turn on our exposure light. In this case with the light I have, it took about 15 minutes to expose this screen. The areas of your emulsion that are exposed to the light become hardened, and the area of your design blocked out by the black part of the film are left unhardened, so you're able to wash out that area with a hose that has high pressure water, and what that leaves you with is, an area where there's open areas and there's closed areas. This is how we're going to do our screen printing because we take the ink with a squeegee, and push it through onto the shirt, and that's basically how it works. It's really simple. Let's get the T-shirt set up, and we're ready to screen print. Now, in the screen printing shop, you'll have a multiple station press. It might be a four-color press or an eight-color press, and that's for printing multiple colors on a T-shirt. But if you're screen printing at home, all you really need to get started is just one screen. We've got our a 100 percent cotton T-shirt, and let's see how it goes. You want to be really careful with your placement, because once you pull the squeegee over, the inks there, you can't reposition it. Now we're ready to do our screen print. You'll notice I've got some plastic assault ink on here. Since this screen hasn't been flooded yet, we need to pull the ink across. Now we're talking. Let's push it back to re-flood it, and then I'm just gonna give it one more pass just to make sure that ink got everywhere. Let's see how this thing looks. That looks really good. The next thing we need to do is, let this air dry, but the ink won't actually set until we heat it. If you're doing this at home, you can just use an iron, put a piece of paper over and iron it, and that'll set the ink. In a commercial shop, they have either a dryer, which is a conveyor belt, and you put the T-shirt in there and it heats up as it goes through. Or they may use what's called a flash unit, to cure the ink on the press. 19. Closing Thoughts: We're getting towards the end of this workshop. Just to recap, we started out with a history of the printed T-shirt. We talked about what makes a good T-shirt design. We talked about fabrics, inks, dies, washes, specialty printing methods, specialty inks. We talked about the different kinds of color separations, and we did a demonstration on how to screen print your own T-shirt. If you enjoyed the workshop, please post a review. A positive review is the best way for me to get the word out about this workshop to other potential students. Be sure to check out my other classes. I have another class called typographic logos, where I'll show you how to design a type-based logo, perfect for T-shirt design. The T-shirt design workshop is a series of workshops. This was the first one. The second one, I'll be demonstrating how to make a mixed media T-shirt design. We'll take the design made in the class and get it printed by three different T-shirt printers. You'll be able to see how that design comes back, actually printed on a T-shirt. It's going to be a lot of fun. To find out more about these workshops, look for the links on this page for details and special discounts. I think that covers everything. Thanks again.